The first NVIDIA Vera CPU benchmarks have been released, showcasing a huge gain over Grace while outperforming the latest AMD EPYC & Intel Xeon chips.
NVIDIA Vera CPU Brings An Impressive 63% Performance Bump Over Grace CPU, Challenges x86 Chips From AMD & Intel
NVIDIA recently announced that its Vera CPUs were in full production, hand-delivering the first CPU racks to major AI firms such as OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic, and Oracle. Vera is a fundamental component of the Extreme Co-Design ecosystem powering the Rubin platform, but with Vera, NVIDIA is entering into a new market for the first time: Standalone CPUs.
The ARM-based CPU with 88 custom Olympus cores is all set to deliver some big upgrades, with NVIDIA promising 50% better performance, twice the performance per watt (efficiency), and four times the density per rack vs traditional x86 CPUs. It's a CPU that is purpose-built for Agentic AI and Inference domains.
Now, the first benchmarks of NVIDIA's Vera CPU have been published by Phoronix, and they showcase a big leap in performance.
In the Geomean of all test results, the NVIDIA Vera CPU with 88 Olympus cores ended up 63% faster than its predecessor, the 72-core Grace CPU. The CPU was also 10% faster than AMD's EPYC 9575F, which has a total of 64 "Zen 5" cores clocked at 5 GHz, while also beating the Intel Xeon 6980P, a 128-core chip based on the Granite Rapids family, by 55%.
These benchmarks give us a first look at the strong performance that NVIDIA's Vera CPU has to offer, and it's more important than ever to look at NVIDIA's CPU designs since they will not only land in Vera Rubin AI systems, but will also be available in standalone models, with NVIDIA aiming to become the biggest CPU supplier in 2026. The demand for Vera is huge, and since Agentic AI loves CPUs, Vera is primed to eat a big share out of Intel and AMD server segments.
At the same time, some important metrics, such as performance per watt (efficiency), are missing from the tests. Phoronix states that they were not permitted to run or showcase these tests. The Vera module they got was an early pre-production hardware, so it looks like we may see some pre-release power tuning & optimizations that will further help the system achieve better performance/efficiency.
Phoronix's conclusion states that this is the "most performant ARM Linux server processor" they have ever tested. Looking ahead, NVIDIA Vera CPUs do face some heated competition in the form of AMD's next-gen EPYC Venice, based on the Zen 6 core architecture, which is already in mass production and primed for a 2H 2026 release. Intel is gearing up its Diamond Rapids platform while Qualcomm and Arm are also working on their own data-center-specific CPUs for the Agentic AI race.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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